


Blue

by reckingstacks



Series: Memory Cell [1]
Category: Neoscum (Podcast)
Genre: Childhood, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-17
Updated: 2019-01-17
Packaged: 2019-10-11 10:56:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17445578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reckingstacks/pseuds/reckingstacks
Summary: Everyone's life begins somewhere. Sometimes that beginning is waking up as a fully-cognisant empty shell.





	Blue

**Author's Note:**

> What's up AO3 it's been like two years since I posted here
> 
> This started out as a very specific couple of sentences in my head that I wanted to type out (expecting to get maybe 100-200 words) and it somehow ended up being almost 700 words so y'all get it on here instead of just as screencaps on my Twitter. It's a little origin flashback based on the idea of Zenith being a clone/transhuman. Enjoy

Black.

Your whole body feels... fuzzy. Distant. Like you're sending signals, urging yourself to move, but nothing is responding. You can't feel anything around you. No surface. No support. Are you floating? It feels like you're floating.

Blue.

You open your eyes, and there is blue all around you. Like water, and you start to panic, but not water, because - you realise - you aren't drowning. The liquid is viscous, and you have to take deep, heaving breaths to get it in and out of your lungs, but it doesn't feel like drowning.

Do you even know what drowning would feel like?

You look down, and you can see-- Skin, hands, fingers. Your skin. Your hands. Your fingers. The realisation jars you. You have a body. Of course you have a body. You were trying to make it move only a minute ago. Move towards what? You turn your head, slow and sluggish, but all you see is bright blue and indistinct shadows moving somewhere. Where? Outside? Outside of what?

Where are you?

Why are you here?

You reach for answers and come up blank. Nothing. Circle back. You have a body, and you have a consciousness. Does that make you a person? You think it does. What does that mean? Do people usually wake up in big blue vats, fully-formed but lacking an identity?

You don't know. You don't know anything, actually. What makes an identity? How does a person get one?

The answers to your questions are clearly not going to come swimming into your hands. You saw movement, so there must be other things around you, somewhere. You have nothing to lose by investigating.

Your arms and legs - oh, you have legs, too, you remember - still feel heavy. The way they drag and the way you have to gasp for every breath as you try to kick your way through the fluid around you makes you feel like you're running in slow motion. That's one thing you know: you should be able to move faster. There's somewhere you can do that. You have to find that place.

You don't get far before you hear noises. You can see the shadows again, flitting about, and the low vibrations of-- something. Voices? Voices. People have voices. You know that, too. You try to use your own but all that comes out is a weak guttural gurgle. Voices are not meant to be used when you're breathing liquid. There's another noise - a heavy clunk, followed by a whirr, and then

And then

And then your whole body seizes up and you can't move, can't see, can't hear, can't scream because your throat is full of blue and now you know that bodies feel pain. Your vision distorts like water and you're vaguely aware of more noise, louder this time, growing closer and clearer, but your senses are too scrambled to process it.

Suddenly, the blue is gone.

It feels like you're drowning.

You cough and sputter and now, with air in your lungs, you can scream. It is such a terrible sound.

As the world swims in and out of focus, you know there are people around you, moving your body as it falls limp. You're on something flat. It's cold; _you're_ cold, you realise. You're so cold. The blue felt like nothing around you, but the air makes you shiver even as they wrap something around you to try and stave it off. They're wheeling you off somewhere. You know because of the way the lights change around you. Everything is so loud. Screaming makes your throat hurt, as it turns out, and as your voice cracks you find yourself coughing, hacking up the last of the blue still sitting in your lungs.

The blue. You should have stayed in the blue.

You feel a sharp prick in your arm, followed immediately by a sense of warmth that floods your veins. As the heat creeps up the side of your face, your eyelids grow heavy, and your vision starts to fade away again.

At least they're affording you this mercy for now.


End file.
